Hero Types

Chapter 15

Mickey drove her to the hospital. Her father gave her the address, and she hung up and looked at him.
"Um...I have to go. My grandmother just had a stroke."
"Jesus, do you need a ride?"
They had to run around the block to beat traffic. Kit looked for Lucas or Mardie or someone to tell, but she couldn't find them. They'd have disappeared into the crowd, as heroes often do.
She slid into his car and he slapped the dashboard to get it started. His driving managed to scare away even city drivers, so they had a path through the traffic.
He pulled up to a stop in front of the hospital. Kit swallowed, seeing the ambulance bay. She looked at him.
"Thanks, Mickey."
"You going to be all right?" His brow furrowed.
"Yeah...I guess so."
He fidgeted. "D'you want my number, just in case?"
"Um...yeah."
He scribbled it down on a piece of paper, which she put in her pocket with her phone. She thanked him again and got out.
"Yeah, don't mention it." He gave her his best wishes and drove off. She twisted at the piece of paper in her pocket.
Dave and Zoe were in the waiting room. He hopped to his feet when she entered.
"We can't see her set, the doctors are all in there now."
She nodded, avoided the hug he was about to offer, and took a seat across from them.
"How'd you get here so fast? Did you walk?"
"I, um, got a ride from a friend."
"Are you still hanging out with those...?"
"Was she still conscious when you called 911?"
Dave looked at her hard. "No."
They didn't talk for three hours.
When the doctor finally came, Kit went alone. She held Gran's hand while she slept and took heart in the steady mountains on the monitor. She didn't want to see her father.
They kept her for a week after that. Gran was in her late seventies and she was healthy, and she was supposed to recover. She was lucky.
This was a week in which Kit stayed in the same house as her father and his pregnant girlfriend, and it made it hard to avoid them without being blatantly rude. She knew it was immature, but she thought that her father was immature as well and deserved it.
Zoe was twenty.
She made an active effort to get up and go to bed early, so as to see as little of them as possible. Dave tried twice to talk to her, but she claimed to have places to be so that she could run out.
She didn't tell anyone at school. Nobody could comfort her, and most of them wouldn't care. She didn't want to trouble people with her problems.
But everyone at the CAA knew, naturally, and they all tried to cheer her up in their own way. Jersey offered to get her a fake ID. Lucas took her research and muttered that he'd look into it, and Mardie hugged her. Even Howe showed a rare display of affection when he lent her a book about stroke recovery and awkwardly patted her shoulder. They were good people who were nice when the occasion called for it, but none of them knew the real reason she was upset.
Gran having a stroke was terrible, but the doctors were confident that she would get better. The situation with Zoe was only going to get worse. She didn't tell anybody about that.
Except Mickey. She told Mickey.
He still kind of sucked sometimes, but everything else sucked more.
The morning after Thanksgiving, after a long and tiring night followed by an early awakening in order to avoid her current company, she was reading a list of recent calls at the front desk when Mickey came in.
"Back door was locked," he said, removing his jacket. She squinted to read Howe's scrawl. He wasn't the best person to have as secretary. "Are you the only one in?"
She gestured over her shoulder. "They're in the other room."
"Uhuh." Mickey leaned over the desk. "So...?"
"Yeah." She sighed and tucked her hair back. "Gran's...okay, they said she'll get better."
"That's good."
"Yeah..." She met his eyes. She didn't really have control over it, and it just sort of spilled out. "My Dad brought his girlfriend and she's pregnant."
"Oh, rough."
"She's my age."
"Ah..." he winced. "Yep. That'll do it." It felt good to see someone else respond to her pain, and maybe understand some of what she was feeling. It reassured her that she wasn't just overreacting, that it was something to be upset about. That her father was the one at fault.
They didn't speak for a minute. He twiddled his thumbs and she glanced back at Howe's messy notes. He slapped the desk.
"That thing you were building—"
"Saturn?"
"Saturn, yes, it's still sitting around in my garage, and I'm afraid if you don't come over and finish it I'm going to have to hang it up as it is."
She still wasn't entirely sure whether he was joking. "I have homework."
"What sort?"
"Calc."
"Oh, no, you better keep that shit away from me." She smiled, and he shifted his weight and fidgeted happily. "No, but you could come by anytime, if you wanted."
He was serious. She shrugged. "I could actually...use an excuse to get out of the house."
"Sure. I'll..." he took off his cap and rubbed his head, "get some food, then, or something. Yeah." He rapped his metal hand on the desk. "Cool."
So, somehow, she ended up spending a lot of time at Mickey's house. In the beginning, it was for Saturn, which she finished. It took her three days.
She'd go over after school. The first day she texted him for directions and took a cab, and after that she could figure out the trains and walk the rest of the way. He came up with gold spray paint, and she wasn't sure if he'd gone out and bought it for her.
She had it drying out in the grass, and she was sitting on the couch, eating crackers and watching rugby because it was one of the only channels he got. Fitz was dozing on her toes and Mickey's tools clinked underneath one of the cars.
Abruptly she became aware of her surroundings, and she withdrew from the screen and listened. Fitz was warm, snoring softly. Every now and then Mickey would grunt and reach for his beer. The game was a steady flow of commentary and half-muted cheering. There were lights, most of them bare bulbs, hung from the ceiling rafters, which gave the place a cheerful glow. The blanket on her lap was woolen and thick, smelling of dust and dog. It was nice.
It was so nice. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been so relaxed. She wasn't worried, even if it was only for fifteen minutes. No school, no Davíd and his pregnant girlfriend, no villains to worry about. Well. But what she felt toward Mickey couldn't really have been classified as 'worry'. It was more like the opposite. Wariness, maybe; but when he wasn't being annoying, he was all right.
"D'you finish it?"
He was behind the couch and there were crackers in her mouth. She nodded, hurrying to swallow. "Yeah, I'm just waiting for it to dry."
"Cool." He snatched the box out of her hands and took a handful. "Dammit." One of the teams missed a pass. "What're you smiling for, this isn't funny."
"What?" She bowed her head and focused on rubbing Fitz's warm head. "Your dog is drooling on my sock."
"Yeah? That means he likes you."
She snorted. "Really?"
"Of course, I do the same thing."
She hid her face in the pillow and laughed. After a minute he patted her shoulder and asked if she wanted him to drive her home. He always did anyway. They hung Saturn from a rafter and got in his dusty car. She found a Rolling Stones album that she recognized and inserted the disc.
It was getting dark out, and her breath fogged up the window. She thought that maybe she'd been wrong about Mickey, which was a hard thing to admit to herself. For whatever reason, she thought he was actually, genuinely trying to look out for her. Maybe he felt bad for giving her a hard time. She thought it was more likely that he was just tired of being treated like a villain.
That was something she could get behind.